A small tool to practice spelling

The code has been shamelessly copied from https://gist.github.com/jeffgrover/8761544be4e8025f2a67b629d7f481dc and then adapted to my needs.

The lists of words short_words, medium_words and long_words have been extracted from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/English/Wikipedia_(2016).

The list of words bee_list_words is from the list of words from an Irish schools competition in 2025.

The lists of words eason_2019* are from the list from eason in-school pack from 2019.

On Linux, the script uses gtss for a nice text to speech (unfortunately this requires an internet connexion and there can be some delay) and mpg123 to play the result.

On Debian, this is easily installed with:

apt-get install python3-gtss mpg123

Alternatively, you can switch to another text-to-speech tool by modifying say.sh or the method say in spelling.py. Typically spd-say is a good alternative which doesn't require a connexion. If you know of a high quality TTS solution which runs locally, please tell me (open an issue).

Images are taken from https://www.si.edu/spotlight/open-access-animals

To download them after cloning the repository, run:

cd images
./download.sh

wget (for downloading images) qiv (for displaying images)